Malala Yousafzai Goes to Washington

Malala Yousafzai, a 16-year-old Pakistani education activist who survived a Taliban attack, attends an International Day of the Girl event at World Bank headquarters during the 2013 World Bank Group-IMF meetings in Washington.

By Dinny McMahon

It’s been a big week for 16-year old Malala Yousafzai, an education campaigner from Pakistan, whose cause nearly cost her her life.

It’s not an offer she’s likely in a hurry to take up. Speaking on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings in Washington, where she was promoting her education push, she held up her father a model for men around the world who are raising daughters.

“Don’t clip not their wings. Let them fly,” she said. “Give them the same rights as your sons.”

Malala started blogging for the BBC in 2009 about life under the Taliban in Pakistan’s Swat Valley and how girls were being prevented from going to school. As her profile rose, she started receiving threats from the Taliban. She was shot in the head by a militant a year ago.

Now she’s setting up a foundation aimed at promoting education for children around the world by building schools, providing teacher training and trying to convince parents to send their girls in particular to get an education, she said Friday.

She said she has given up on her dream to become a doctor and instead planned to become a politician.

“By being a doctor I can only help a small area, a community. If someone is shot I can just treat that person,” she told a crowd dominated by young women and girls in a city where politicians had brought the U.S. government to a shutdown. “But as a politician I can change things so that no one will be shot again.”

On Friday, Malala spoke alongside World Bank President Jim Yong Kim to mark the International Day of the Girl, launched by the United Nations in 2011 “to recognize girls’ rights and the unique challenges girls face around the world.”

“I’m am proud to be a girl. We girls can change the world,” Malala said. “Tomorrow we will not need a day” of our own.

Update: Later in the day, Malala met with President Barack Obama and his daughters in the White House.

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